Here is Nero, being a jerk watching his mom Agrippina get dissected. He killed her as well, making him a double-jerk. But what might be surprising about this Medieval scene is that the actual dissection of cadavers was an okay and not-considered-jerk behavior – in the right circumstances, of course.
For a long period, historians of the Middle Ages thought that human cadaver dissection was totally forbidden. Indeed, it was taboo and at times legally off-limits in the Ancient Greco-Roman world. But by the 13th-century, universities were becoming popular, and the practice of medicine was especially trendy in northern Italy.
The Papacy did issue a declaration around 1300 stating that anyone “cutting up bodies of the dead and boiling them so as to separate the bones” would be excommunicated, which many historians had imagined referred to dissection. But now the line of thought is that this Papal bull actually was targeting a practice that the crusaders were doing — in the hopes of preserving the corpses of their compatriots who died far from home for burial in Europe.
The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194-1250) stated that medical schools should perform at minimum one dissection every five years so that students would be able to attend during their studies. The first actual named person to perform a human dissection was the physician Mondino de Luzzi in 1315. The body was probably a female who had been executed, and, as the dissection commenced, Mondino was likely surrounded by students as he tried to corroborate the anatomical writings of the second-century anatomist Galen. The scientific revolution was still centuries away, but the barricades to investigative anatomy were eroding.
Source(s): “Mondino de Luzzi: A luminous figure in the darkness of the Middle Ages,” Alexandra Mavrodi and George Paraskevas, _Croatian Medical Journal_, 2014 February; 55(1): 50-53. Doi: 10.3325/cmj.2914.55.50. British Library, Harley 4425, f. 59 “Nero and Agripina,” circa 1500.
